October 03, 2005

Zalman Schachter: The Rebbe Gave Me A Blessing To Take LSD

In a new Ha'aretz profile, former Chabad emissary Zalman Schachter-Shalomi makes the following explosive claim:

"I first took acid with [Timothy] Leary," recalled Zalman in his characteristically deep, warm voice. At 81, his demeanor and energy are those of a much younger man. "That was several years before I knew [Richard] Alpert [a.k.a., Ram Das]. And the Lubavitcher Rebbe gave me a bracha (blessing) before I did it".

Schachter later modifies his claim:

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson made a point of plying Zalman with tall tumblers of vodka, and blessing him so that he would have "a successful retreat" and "a successful meditation." In retrospect, Zalman believes that the Rebbe was presciently blessing his upcoming LSD trip. Zalman later asked the Rebbe if he would be interested in taking LSD himself, but Rabbi Schneerson politely declined.

It would be more than two years before the Rebbe would eject Schachter from Chabad:

From his arrival in New York City in 1941 and up until 1968 when a talk he gave on kabbala and LSD goaded the Lubavitch establishment to banish him from their midst Zalman was officially associated with the movement. "I was a good apparatchik," he told me. Sent out by the Lubavitcher Rebbe in the early 1950s, along with the legendary Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, as the movement's first rabbinic shlichim (envoys) …

Comments

sure he will give him , it's nothing but fancy vodka !
we have here in our city a talk show presented every week by the same self satisfied faces exchanging platitudes around a table with vodka (glasses , may be ) and oranges .
the vodka's significance to them , is well documented . I never understood what the oranges have to do with chassidus ?!

Where can I start with this article and do you have a link for the rest of the article?

1) The Conservative movement, not Lubavitch, kicked Zalman out in the late 60s (He was the Rabbi of a large Conservative congregation in Canada). Lubavitch had kicked him out years earlier.

2) Zalman had been a drug addict long before he tried LSD. He had been on hard drugs at least from his teenage years. LSD was just one of many drugs Zalman used. No one I've talked to knew Zalman at any point of time before he was addicted to drugs, so I cannot comment on what he was like before.

3) As indicated in this article, senior Lubavitch Rabbis knew about his use and promotion of hard drugs and did nothing for many years. He was not kicked out of Lubavitch because of drugs primarily. His conduct with young women was more of a concern.

4) Zalman is currently a self proclaimed recovering sex addict as well. He was known for decades to have brought women home to have group sex. In the past, his conversions of women at times led to sexual relations.

5) Zalman has cancer and has been undergoing treatment for some time. He does not appear well and likely is on his last few years. Interestingly, people have began the process of positioning themselves to take over Jewish Renewal. The top candidate currently appears to be child molester Rabbi Mordechai Gafni.

He is not recovering from his sex addiction he seems to want to infect the rest of the world with it. There is a well known picture of the Lubavitch yeshiva in Shanghai. One of the faces is deliberately blurred out. I don't know if Shachter was in Shanghai, but my gut feeling tells me it's him.
The man is Koifer from way back, before he left his wife and ran off with a shiksa and had kids with her. The following quote is very telling: "This very same urge has been reinforced time and time again since we stopped being amoebas and turned into humans." He's clearly outdone Slifkin in every way, shape, and form. The quote is the least of his statements in the following article. The article is not meant to be read by anyone who has the slightest shred of Yiras Shamayim. You can read it with no problem Shmarya.